This invention relates generally to poultry processing and more particularly to the processing of a poultry carcass skeleton to recover the cartilage from the breast bone.
The cartilage from the breasts of poultry is used by the pharmaceutical and cosmetic industries as one of the ingredients for certain products. Heretofore, the cartilage has been manually recovered from the carcass skeleton after the meat has been removed in deboning operations. Not only is this manually operation tedious and highly repetitive, it is also sufficiently expensive to carry out that processors have been unable to recover their costs bases on the selling price of the cartilage harvested from the poultry carcass skeleton. Moreover, such manual operations have had difficulty in removing most of the meat and membranes still connected to the cartilage after the deboning operation so that significant further processing by the entities using the cartilage was required before the cartilage was ready for use as a pharmaceutical or cosmetic ingredient.